"It's alive!" to basically paraphrase Sony CEO Howard Stringer's take on the PlayStation Network, noting how the hacker-plagued online gaming service finally lumbered back to life in mid-May. Stringer spoke at the IFA electronics trade show in Berlin yesterday and reportedly said PSN sales are now higher than they were before the attack forced Sony to shutter and begin rebuilding the service in mid-April.

"I'm pleased to tell you that the PSN is more secure and better than ever," said Stringer at an IFA news conference, per Cnet. "We are aggressively expanding its content. We have more than 3 million new customers since the network came back online, and sales are exceeding what we had before the cyberattacks."

The PSN went dark on April 20 in what Sony first claimed was an outage. That changed a week later when the company admitted that "external intruder(s)" had prompted them to shut the service off. The intruders managed to grab the personal account information of over 75 million PSN users—one of the largest breaches of confidential user information in history.

"This year, we at Sony have been flooded, we've been flattened, we've been hacked, we've been singed," said Stringer at the IFA conference. "But the summer of our discontent is behind us. The past is a prologue to future possibility."

It'll certainly need to be, given all the ways Sony's being challenged by competitors across its spectrum of media technologies.

In related news, Sony just brought its PlayStation Network, Video on Demand, and Music Unlimited (Qriocity) services under a single brand umbrella: "Sony Entertainment Network" (that's SEN, not to be confused with "Zen," though the near-homophonous similarity probably isn't coincidental).